Katie Booth

The Invention of Miracles

Runner-up for the Mark Lynton History Prize

Shortlisted for the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography

Shortlisted for the British Academy Book Prize for Global Cultural Understanding

Longlisted for the Nonfiction Crown Award

We think of Alexander Graham Bell as the inventor of the telephone, but that’s not how he saw his own career. As the son of a deaf woman and, later, husband to another, his goal in life from adolescence was to teach deaf students to speak. Even his tinkering sprang from his teaching work; the telephone had its origins as a speech reading machine.

The Invention of Miracles is an astonishingly revisionist biography of an American icon, revealing the extraordinary true genesis of the telephone and its connection to another, far more troubling legacy of Bell’s: his efforts to stamp out American Sign Language. Weaving together a dazzling tale of innovation with a moving love story, the book offers a heartbreaking look at how heroes can become villains and an enthralling account of the deaf community’s fight to reclaim a once-forbidden language.

Katie Booth has been researching this story for over fifteen years, poring over Bell’s papers, Library of Congress archives, and the records of deaf schools around America. But she’s also lived with this story for her entire life. Witnessing the damaging impact of Bell’s legacy on her family would set her on a path that upturned everything she thought she knew about language, power, deafness, and the telephone.

*

“Engagingly written… Booth’s descriptions of Bell’s passionate courtship of his student Mabel Hubbard, who belonged to a much higher social class, are as stirring as a romance novel, and her narrative of his work on the telephone reads like a thriller… Her meticulous research and rigor are evident on every page.”
— The New York Times

*

“Impassioned and scrupulously researched… Enriched with vivid sketches of Bell’s wife, Mabel Hubbard, and other historical figures, including Helen Keller, this revelatory history deserves a wide readership.”
— Publishers Weekly

*

“Meticulously researched, crackling with insights, and rich in novelistic detail, The Invention of Miracles is more than the revelatory biography of an inventor who transformed the world. By shining a bright light on society’s assumptions about disability, Booth’s book is a profound and lyrical meditation on what it means to be human. “
— STEVE SILBERMAN, author, NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity

*

"Researched and written through the Deaf perspective, Katie Booth’s The Invention of Miracles is a compelling biography of Alexander Graham Bell, whose lifelong devotion to Deaf education became overshadowed by his harmful promotion of oralism and left a legacy of bruised hands through generations of Deaf people. This is marvelously engaging history that will have us rethinking the invention of the telephone."
— JAIPREET VIRDI, historian and author of Hearing Happiness: Deafness Cures in History 

*

“Provocative, sensitive, and beautifully written.”
— SYLVIA NASAR, New York Times bestselling author of A Beautiful Mind

*

“As schoolchildren we learn that Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone. We don’t learn that this is among the least interesting things about him. It takes a book like Katie Booth’s The Invention of Miracles to teach us that. Provocative, personal, and exhaustively researched, Booth’s book is the rare biography that completely alters a famous person’s popular image… Booth has the courage and perspective to portray her subject’s deeply flawed humanity, giving the book its poetry and tragic resonance.”
— The Boston Globe

*
“Katie Booth’s brave and absorbing book is the story of a contradictory genius whose inventiveness outstripped his compassion… Booth’s style is highly poetic, even moving… [and] so scrupulously researched you feel like you’re walking alongside the inventor as he strides the Scottish moors or looking over his shoulder as he researches the qualities of different kinds of current in his Boston home.”
— Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

*

“A fascinating tale of great love, innovation, personal drama, and the unexpected consequences of good intentions.”
— WALTER ISAACSON, New York Times bestselling author of Steve Jobs

*

“The Invention of Miracles is a powerful revisionist text, at once personal, historical, and insightful. As someone born deaf with hearing parents I think I would have benefitted from being born into a world where ableist attitudes were rooted out and understood the way Booth demonstrates here.”
— RAYMOND ANTROBUS, author of The Perseverance

*

“Refreshingly candid. Booth does a masterful job weaving this powerful and compelling story about fear and obsessive fascination with difference.”
— BRIAN GREENWALD, professor of history at Gallaudet University,
co-editor of In Our Own Hands: Essays in Deaf History 1780 - 1970

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